Still Moving: A Sculptor’s Response to Working in Japan - a lecture and discussion by Antony Gormley

As the final event in The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation / Japan Society 2005 series on ‘The Arts, Culture and Society in the UK and Japan’, Antony Gormley spoke of his perspectives on the Japanese contemporary art scene and his own experience of exhibiting and working inJapan.

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950. Upon completing a degree in archaeology, anthropology and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, he travelled to India, returning to London three years later to study at the Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College, and the Slade School of Art.

Over the last 25 years, Antony Gormley has revitalised the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool and material. Since 1990, he has expanded his concern with the human condition to explore the collective body and the relationship between self and other in large-scale installations like Allotment, Critical Mass, Another Place, and most recently Domain Field and Inside Australia.

Antony Gormley’s work has been exhibited extensively, with solo shows throughout the UK in venues such as the Whitechapel, Tate and Hayward Galleries, the British Museum and White Cube and internationally at museums including the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Kolnischer Kunstverein in Germany.

He first exhibited in Tokyo in 1987 and since then has had eight one-man exhibitions in cities across Japan. More recently,  ‘Certain Made Places’, opened at Gallery Koyanagi inTokyo in September 2005.

He has participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and the Kassel Documenta 8. His ‘Field’ has toured America and Europe, and Asia.  Angel of the North and, most recently, Quantum Cloud on the Thames in Greenwich are amongst the most celebrated examples of contemporary British sculpture.

He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994 and the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and was made an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Trinity College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge, and has been a Royal Academician since 2003.

Organised in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Japan Society.

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